Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara

Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara is a 32 year old native of Rabula village in the Keiskammahoek district of the Eastern Cape.

He stays in Cape Town with his wife, Nolene Morris. He has worked for more than 8 years in the non-governmental sector in South Africa in the areas of human rights advocacy, HIV/AIDS, media liaison, communications, public & community education, community development, local government transformation, local economic development, promotion of co-operatives, alternative economic transformation, financial sector transformation, social and economic justice, and land and agrarian reform.

Mazibuko has worked as the chief spokesperson and strategist for the South African Communist Party (SACP) for the five years between February 2000 and April 2005.

He remains an active member of the Party and its Young Communist League (YCL). Mazibuko has previously worked as a student engineer-in-training at ESKOM Power Stations in Mpumalanga and as a Project Coordinator and National Director at the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality (NCGLE – now known as the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project).

As an activist, in addition to his professional working experience, Mazibuko has also served as a board member of the AIDS Consortium, Dora Tamana Co-operative Centre, Treatment Action Campaign, Development Update (SANGOCO-Interfund publication) and the Ceasefire Campaign for Demilitarisation. Currently, he serves on the boards of the Community Health Media Trust, the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project and the Ntaba ka Ndoda Heritage Festival (in his Rabula home village). At university, Mazibuko was a member of the Students' Representative Council and a student activist in the South African Students' Congress and the Young Christian Students.

Mazibuko currently works as the Research Director of the Ikhwezi Institute, a newly established a progressive, black-led think tank which seeks to provide critical and radical perspectives on society, development, the economy and the South African transition by catalysing and fostering critical and progressive discourse by black intellectuals and activists.

Mazibuko is currently writing his mini-thesis for an M.Phil degree in Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape. He previously studied for a B.Sc. Mechanical Engineering Degree at the former University of Natal (Durban).